


cum mea cineres, crescere tua ossa

by auxbloood



Series: We Don't Talk to Gods Anymore [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Begin Complicated Detective Story, Come for Connor Swearing, Connor and Gavin Reed Partners in Crime, Eventual Big Gay Love Story, Eventual Depiction of Death and Murder, Eventual Gavin Reed Backstory, Eventual Graphic Violence and Gore, Eventual Romance, Eventual Serial Killer Plot, Gavin Reed Has Humor Drier than the Sahara, Gavin a.k.a VP of the Sad Boys Motorcycle Club, Loss of Innocence, M/M, Now Featuring Professor Gavin Phcking Reed, Now Featuring Snails, Sad Boys Motorcycle Club of Detroit, Self-Acceptance, Self-Doubt, Stay for Silence of the Lambs Meets The Davinci Code Meets Connor History Major, Traffic Laws? What Traffic Laws?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-11-24 05:03:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20902079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxbloood/pseuds/auxbloood
Summary: This was his last chance to latch on to the ghost of the man he kept hanging in his closet. To put him on in a facade, just in case things just didn’t work out. In case he found he was really a coward underneath it all. In case he needed to crawl back to the placid misery that his life as a machine had begot. In case he needed to show up at the DPD one morning with a mimetic ‘hello, I’m the android sent by CyberLife,’ and play none the wiser while he just reverted back into the android of old. There could be comfort there, in the mundane, forfeiture of the unknown. In things he was made for. Of things that were known.But the hand of fate was absent at his brow. The halls were quiet. The only decision was his own.‘The less I know, the better,’ the ghost whispered, somewhere deep inside of him.trans.// cum mea cineres, crescere tua ossa[with my ashes, grow your bones]// ON HIATUS AS OF 05/04/2020 due to loss of fic on my hard drive :( will continue eventually once re-writes happen





	1. principio

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a continuation of a series, 'We Don't Talk to Gods Anymore.' For the greatest context, please read part one. The level of aNgSt might not make sense otherwise.
> 
> For additional consideration of the tone of each chapter, use the playlist at the end of each upload if you want to hear the same three songs that I listened to for hours on end while writing each chapter, because my brain hates me and I can't fudging write otherwise. 
> 
> Fic updates weekly on Sunday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trans.// principio  
[beginning]

——————————

Two weeks later.

——————————

>>>[;//2039/10/JUNE]

The first thing Connor did was cut down his hours at the DPD.

Well, if we’re perfectly splitting synthetic hairs here, the first thing he’d done would have been finding somewhere to live. Connor, fresh out of the bachelor box, homeless extraordinaire, had blithely realized that after breaking up with Hank Anderson on the roof of the Detroit Police Department he had absolutely no where to go at night. Or at all anymore, really.

He’d stormed down from the DPD roof, gotten about fifteen steps in front of the building, and had the revelation that breaking up with Hank had de-vested him of all rights to accessing his singular place of residence. But it wasn't like he was ready to really go back now. Not really, at all.

For the first few nights, his time-occupying routine had been either caterwauling his pent up frustration in the form of bullets in dummies in the department basement, or crying himself into stasis in the broom closet on the second floor (much more privacy than the one on the first, he had found). In between, he flirted between lolling in the DPD, bouncing between stasis and casework, and casually slipping out of the office, pretending to hunt down leads the second that Hank showed up to the precinct.

On day three and a half of tactful avoidance and self-lamentation, he realized that he really didn’t want to spend the rest of his life clandestinely doing anything to avoid even running the risk of having to look in Hank’s general direction. The routine was getting old, and he was quickly running out of creative excuses as to why he sauntered down from the second floor every morning. So, he looked up classifieds online, and put a deposit down on the first available mid-town android friendly apartment vacancy he’d found. A tiny note, written perfectly in CyberLife Sans, taped to the peeling paint on his front door, let Hank Anderson know that he’d be by the house later for his things. When he wasn’t present, of course.

Despite the ongoing emotional difficulty with the subject, Connor was ultimately finding that breaking away from the entire scope, focus and point of his short, Android life was...

Well. . . really quite easy.

Sure, there was the abject depression and realization that the only man that had ever claimed to love him hated every fiber of his carefully woven being, but. . . 

The decisions themselves felt good, justified, like a step in the right direction for what he needed in the end. But with the highs came lows, and throughout, Connor had sensed a heaviness settle on him. A complicated rhythm and wave of dis-ease, flowing though his mind while he hid and scampered and acted like nothing else was wrong. The crying was easy to identify; latent stress from the loss of an important relationship. The avoidance; typical for one who was avoiding a previous lover.

There was still something beneath it all.

It wasn’t that he was in any kind of tangible distress, albeit his arm was becoming more of a problem all the time. No. Connor was unabashedly, beneath it all, in every definition of candor, just. . . tired.

Tired of dealing with too much, all the time, every time anything happened to him. Of posturing himself to everyone but 'me, myself, and I.' He was still doing it now, covering for him and Hank to the other officers, establishing excuses, refusing to admit what was really going on between them to avoid any other difficult confrontation.

His wellbeing was just about the last sub-routine in his daily function.

Could one have ever deigned that being alive would have been so melancholy?

So the primary task he’d set for himself as his own, and un-belonging to anyone else, no more tags and labels, was to demand that he put himself first.

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE;//BE ALIVE]

And he knew the first thing he would do to follow his prime directive.

//

It’d been an awkward talk with Fowler, what with almost half of his staff skipping town after Detroit, quote, ‘went to complete and utter shit,’ leaving him with a ragtag crew of detectives and beat cops that were weary to the last molecule with the constant onslaught of double shifts. But Connor. . . Connor's exhaustion transcended his service protocol. And after the absolute catastrophe of a month he’d had, he’d come to a singular conclusion. 

He was long overdue for a little 'me time.' And removing the DPD from his sole focus was the catalyst for the change.

After all, according to everyone from God to Jesus to the President of the United States he was a person now, and he had the right to let everyone know that he wasn’t some perfect, sleek, automated detective machine that spat out mocha flavored ‘cappu-here’s-the-fifth-case-i’ve-solved-for-you-this-week-chinos.’

That was the Keurig in the break room’s job. Not his. Not anymore. 

So that was it, he'd told fowler, with his arms clasped respectfully behind his back while a disconcerting number of veins burst forth from the police chief’s temple. Connor explained that he could take the down-to thirty hours per week time cut he was offering or go dig up some other detective android that could ID’d perps by licking them.

“I ought to just fire your ass right now,” Fowler fumed, clenching his fists around the metal corners of his desk. For some length of seconds, Connor had fully expected him to make good on his threat.

“But as luck would have it, I don’t have another RK-800 unit lurking in the rafters to jump down and take on your caseload. So guess what?” He lamented, taking a deep breath and flinging himself back down into his office chair. “You’re the first detective in the eleven years I’ve been here to get approved down to part-time. Whoop-de-fucking-doo for you, son.”

Fowler rubbed his fingers into his eyes as Connor surged forward, trying to offer a hand in a conciliatory handshake, but Fowler no longer acted like he was there.

“I promise you won’t regret this, sir. I’ve researched the benefits of what time off will do for my productivity, and I can repo-…”

“Stop. Rewind your bullshit. Get the FUCK out of my office.”

. . .

“Yes, sir.” 

Connor turned on his heel, soles clacking brightly along the floor as their exuberant rhythm completely betrayed the abject enthusiasm that he was desperately trying to keep hidden. He and Hank had been gone often enough on investigations over the past few months that he doubted any of the cops would really notice a decrease in the amount of time he was at his desk, but he wasn’t going to flaunt his victory either. Everyone was beat down, ragged to the bone with all of the Red Ice busts and murders and general chaos that the android revolution had brung. It wouldn’t be courteous to announce his singular privilege.

Some of them had enough reasons to despise him already. . .

//

Speaking of which, as Connor walked past the bull-pen on the way to his station, Friday night approaching, the prime example was barreling toward him, leather jacket and a (the fifth today, to be precise according to his memory) cup of steaming coffee in his hands, heading toward the rear exit that opened to the department’s private parking garage.

Gavin Reed normally walked with a purpose. Purposefully annoying, purposefully hateful, or purposefully idiotic, which was Connor’s personal favorite of the many modes of the detective, and today he seemed to be graced with the presence of something describable between ‘constipated’ and ‘homicidal’ judging by the absolute vitriol with which Gavin considered Connor as he unceremoniously dumped the entire cup of coffee across his chest when Connor’s shoulder bumped his as he failed to pass.

Connor continued on, looked back at him as he arrived at his quarters, half turning while scoffed at the menagerie. Gavin shouted his predictable string of profanities as he shook the liquid from his fingertips on to the unsuspecting officers who were unlucky enough to be in the splash-zone for the event. “Detective Reed, do try and watch where you’re going when you’re in a hurry. It might spare your co-workers some trouble every now and then.” 

“Fuck you! Goddamn Chrome-book,” Reed threw back at him along with the now empty cup of coffee while his left hand swatted at the growing stain on his white v-neck. Connor didn’t even bother to flinch, the cup glancing harmlessly off of him, not surprised at the turn of events while he closed his terminal now that his Friday shift was ending. Reed sauntered off in a java-drenched rage while Connor piled up his things, the man apparently in too much of a hurry to offer too much more indecency.

Their typical interaction, as of late. If it wasn’t so utterly trite, Connor had decided, he would have almost been comforted by their near daily exchanges. At least something in his life was stable. He could always expect Gavin Reed to be one leviathan of an asshole.

And on the subject, it certainly seemed like the daily entourage of co-workers that went out of their way to make his and every android’s life utterly miserable did nothing but grow lately.

. . . at least of the latest initiates was, thankfully, absent for most of his shift. Blissfully missing as the day came to a close. Yet another contender to the ‘Connor the walking shithead-machine’ 2039 grand-slam title, he sighed internally.

Yet the android had no time for such thoughts today. Between the peacocking from Detective Reed and the looming anxiety affiliated with his ex-partner, he had more important matters to attend to right now. As he gathered his jacket and keys, he realized that for the first time that, maybe for the first time ever, really, he was going home, and he was going home with a schedule on purely his own terms. 

No extraneously mandated obligations, no thinly veiled aggressive dispositions, nobody to yell at him if he wanted to stand in the middle of the living room in his apartment for three hours listing mundane thing after mundane thing in his brain until his micro-processors begged his brain to shut up for five minutes. He had done this one night recently, just after moving in to his studio, brain fixated on reading every archived Wikipedia page on the history of cheese-making because of an advertisement for ‘buy-one-get-one-gruyere’ he’d seen on the top of a local market advertisement on his way to work, and it made him curious as to the logistical origins of foreign cheeses in the United States. 

What? There was a lot of alone time, lately.

It felt like he was a whole new being. And he supposed he was, he thought, walking through the door to the parking garage where the first spark of his self-intimacy was waiting. An ultimate, flamboyant proof of his attempt to be himself for his own self. The first mark of a long string of decisions that had lead to his real, true freedom.

Where his vintage 1986 Yamaha FZ6 N was waiting. The thing was still rain-slick from his drive back from an earlier scene, blue and red laden like some horrific graphic design on the side of a throwaway paper cup in a mall food court but he was practically in love with it at this point, and it was the first thing he’d bought that was really, utterly his own.

//

He’d been watching television late at night, weeks after he’d first deviated when he didn’t really know what to do with himself yet besides enter stasis, work on case files and. . . well, take care of Hank, really. There was some marathon of animated cartoons playing on one of the late night channels. ‘Yes, Your Mother’s Movie Hour,’ it was labeled in a glaringly embarrassing attempt at humor, sporting titles from before the year 2000. He’d tuned in, not much else on, LED flickering as he switched the channel. There was a young Japanese boy on the television, bright in cardinal red, streaking down a gritty alley on a red speed bike, the city shimmering around him. His world was choked, full of light, and noise, and death, and danger.

The boy was wild. He was free. 

He was utterly alone.

('Just like me.')

So, Connor hopped on Craiglist4.0 and scrolled through 2,883 local postings for ‘vintage Japanese 1980s motorcycle’ in three and a half minutes and what did you know when the next day there was a spritely old gentleman with a green and maroon spiked mohawk named ‘Motor Larry’ (according to the truck’s license plate) delivering a brand new spitfire Yamaha right to Hank’s front door.

“What in the ever-living fuck is this monstrosity?!” Hank had sputtered while Connor shook Larry’s hand and backed the mint-condition bike down the ramp and into the driveway.

Connor patted the leather seating, running his fingertips along the chrome and plasti-steel reinforced plating before he turned to Hank, absolutely beaming.

“It’s mine,” he’d said, smile brighter than the moon.

//

Connor dug the keys out of his front pocket as he approached the bike in the lot, grinning at the recollection of that first moment; the bike was his first truly nonsensical impulse as a deviant. As someone who was alive.

“Well,” he argued to himself out loud, throwing his right leg over the seat and snapping the visor shut on his helmet as he threw the clutch and the beast roared, “I guess it could have been worse.”

He sped away, feeling the wind whip around him as he rode north to his apartment. He did not stop to contemplate for even a moment that he was already riding seven miles over the speed limit, and found that he didn’t really care.

———————————

Connor arrived home at 6:46pm, stalking swiftly up the stairs to apartment 1612, throwing his jacket and helmet to the side of his couch (which was still in it’s shrink-wrap from IKEA, disassembled, he noted, but chose to ignore), bee-lining for the bedroom. He’d let himself buy a few modest items of clothing since December, feeling the need to branch out form CyberLife shoes, slacks, and jacket for every occasion. He still generally insisted on wearing them at the precinct, what with there being a lack of android-standard uniforms available at the DPD, but he found that it gave him a certain level of. . . discomfort. . . to continue donning them when he arrived at home. Besides, tonight he had a reason to look as non-android-like as humanly possible. He was on his own mission today.

Because tonight, June 17th, 2039, was Connor’s first day of class.

Wesleyan University, established 1896. Western Detroit's academic pride and joy.

'Go Warhounds.'

Oo-rah.

That was the third, first thing he’d decided; that he wanted to learn. About things that didn’t involve the hemoglobin-congealment rate of blood in warm weather versus sub-zero conditions, and the other assorted accoutrements of gristly facts that CyberLife had so kindly pre-loaded in him for his job as a deviant-hunter-turned-detective. And he wanted to do it the old fashioned way; studying with real-life books, asking questions that he didn’t immediately know the answer to instead of looking them up at the speed of nano-byte light. 

He wanted to do something that made him feel totally, vulnerably alive.

//

>>>[;//2039/10/JUNE]

One week earlier.

It wasn’t easy to convince the admissions officer at Wesleyan University to let him in when he’d sat down last Friday, the absolute last moment to register for the Summer semester because Connor had been too nervous about the decision to get himself down to the bursar’s office a minute sooner. For his luck, she had been an android, brought on by the university in an inclusionary hiring event since the events of last November, she’d explained as she tentatively shook Connor’s hand and logged into her administrator’s portal.

“You know, Mr. . . .?”

“Just Connor,” he’d offered, folding his hands politely in front of him.

“Connor, then. We don’t really admit androids, you know. What with the ability to download information through CyberLife’s extranet database at any time, and all. No one has really addressed the issue of androids' place in academia because there hasn’t really been a need for that discussion, I suppose.”

Connor’s LED had flashed to yellow, disquieted that she had pinpointed the exact fear he’d contemplated a thousand times before working up the courage to finally schedule a meeting for discussing enrollment. He knew that there was always a risk that they’d think that his advantages as an android would outweigh the benefit of allowing him passage into the university’s latest semester.

“I understand the concern,” he began, “but I did want to assure you that I have no intention of utilizing my connection to the CyberLife mainframe while attending any sort of lecture, or performing any work that would be required of me while here.”

She pursed her lips, the only indication of her dissatisfaction as she had removed the LED from her temple. “Be that as it may, universities have very rigid structures when it comes to the legitimacy of their programs, and I just don’t think that we’re ready to run the gambit of students rioting once they learn that the top performer in the class, which we both know you would be, and forgive me, is capable of machine learning.”

“If the scandal the university would face is your concern, I can agree to download firmware that would block access of any outside connection to extraneous databases while on the campus premises. I couldn’t guarantee that while off-site, due to the nature of my work, but I can assure you that I’d never put myself at that level of advantage while here.”

“And what, exactly, is it that you do for work, Connor? Why bother to pursue another vocation in the first place?”

He'd hesitated, not sure if telling the android that he hunted homicidal maniacs that ripped apart people limb from limb, and made floors into mould-pans for red, bloody jello when he shot them, was a good idea. But he didn’t have a backup, and didn’t particularly want to lie either, in case that would hinder his chances instead.

“I am a police officer with the DPD,” he offered for a compromise. “I have already begun to shift my hours to less than full-time in order to accommodate what I’m sure will be a rigorous commitment while enrolled.”

She looked at him, tapping her finely manicured hand along the edge of her desk-sized calendar, his response seeming to drive her to contemplation rather than the immediate rejection he’d halfway expected. She looked from him, to her computer terminal, and then back through the motion again, finally typing something into the screen in front of her. Connor resisted the temptation to construct exactly what she was typing as her fingers flew across the keys.

His arm twitched.

He reached to touch the coin he knew lay securely in his coat pocket. But he resisted, clenching his fist instead, knowing it would seem odd to employ its therapeutic effects while in front of a complete stranger, nonetheless within the confines of a formal meeting. For know, he had to cope while his fingers itched and his brain begged him to remove his courtesy protocols and just reconstruct what she had been writing already.

A few minutes passed, Connor’s anxiety growing steadily with every muted tap of the iso-graphic computer board, until she sighed heavily, and turned to him with a distasteful expression.

'Rejection,' Connor mused internally. He had estimated a 71% chance of failure, and failure it was.

Tough luck, Chuck.

But she said nothing, raising her hand toward Connor as her skin shrinked back towards her slender wrist. “May I have permission to send you some information, Connor?”

“Of course,” and he clasped her hand within his. 

[LOADING PACKET;//]  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>[;//LOAD COMPLETE]

[!WELCOME TO DETROIT’S PRESTIGIOUS WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, CONNOR! STUDENT ID REGISTERED: 04201]

She pulled away, turning back toward her terminal as Connor gaped at her with mild bewilderment. “That upload's your student handbook, welcome packet from the dean of admissions, and your class schedule with syllabus. I noticed in your request for this meeting you had stated that you wanted to study Medieval Literature, so you’re signed up part time for 3 hours worth of classes. That was all that I could schedule you for so last minute. There aren’t many students nowadays that want to study things that aren’t modern so we always have at least some light availability in the introduction courses for ancient histories, but not many lectures available.”

“Th-thank you, I don’t know what to say, really,” he laughed in stunned relief, running his hand through his hair as he blushed with absolute delight that his last minute plan had somehow worked. Thank Christ something finally was.

“Don’t thank me quite yet, Connor.” She shifted, staring at him directly, her posture assuming the authority of someone who was about to suredly lay consequences before him. Fowler had a stance none-too similar. “You’re registered as one Connor Aston, 27, member of the school’s initiative to re-enroll older learners in light of the mass-exodus from Detroit this past year. Here, you aren’t an android. You’re a human, and you’d better think of a lengthy background before next weekend. I'm sure you'll get asked where you're from a few dozen times. . . I just can’t let you in unless you explicitly agree to block use of extraneous databases while on campus, as you proposed, and to remove your LED before the beginning of your first lecture, 7:30pm next Friday evening. You can give no inclination that you're an android. You’ll have to leave that part of your identity alone while you’re here, if you want to learn at all. I’m not about to be fired from here for your sake, but at the same time,” she paused her stoic stance, eyes softening a bit as she continued on, “I can’t keep someone who genuinely, truly wants to learn from their passion. We don’t see enough of that these days. We need to trade violence for healing."

Connor stood up, ready to gush his absolute, unwavering approval for the plan, too excited to contemplate the underlying logistics of what she was proposing, when she stopped him for the final time.

“If you want to spend every Friday night pouring over the absolute slog that is learning Medieval Latin, Greek, and Judeo-Christian cultural structures, be my guest, Connor. Not to mention that the lecturer for that course is. . . well, he's interesting, to say the least. I wish you genuine luck. But if there is any rumor, any at all, that you are in breach of this contract, I will feign my own ignorance and you will be removed. Consider this opportunity one hell of a privilege.”

She offered her hand then, ushering him toward the door as they shook on their accord, her citing another student due to her office in five minutes time.

“I’ll make sure to honor what we spoke about today. Thank you, thank you again.”

He was blue the whole day on.

//

Of course, it hadn’t been until 6:54 the night of, after he’d changed into a supple brown leather jacket, beanie, dark jeans and (what he hoped were) modern-fashion acceptable sneakers, that he’d even bothered to consider the issue with the LED.

The one that was still firmly supplanted to his forehead.

Right.

So he was in his bathroom, clasped to the edge of the sink, staring intently at the ring of red spinning over and over and over on his temple while his internal monitors constantly chimed that with current congestion he had exactly 36 minutes to drive through traffic from north to west Detroit in order to arrive to his first lecture on time. This wasn't his first time crouched before the mirror in such a state, and certainly not the first where he wished that the thing would have just shellacked off of his head and ran off to join the rest of his baggage in the trash when he’d moved.

But there was always an attachment there, an obligation, something that always brought him back from the brink when he’d held scissors, or tweezers, or his own nails to his head tentatively beginning the process of clawing the thing off. It was who he was before. A reminder of where he came from. His identity to others. There was so much of that within him, reminding him constantly of his CyberLife directives, struggling with the phantoms of everyone else's whims.

Any time he thought he’d finally decided to let his LED go, wash the thirium from the operation down the drain and look at himself in the mirror with a ‘hello, new Connor,’ he just couldn’t do it. The grip of his past was too strong.

And here was was, at the crossroads once again.

[!REMINDER;//6:59pm!]  
>>>[MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND LORE;//CLASS BEGINNING IN 31 MINUTES]  
>>>[DISPLAY QUICKEST ROUTE TO APPOINTMENT LOCATION?]  
>>>[YES]^[NO]^

Shit.

Shit.

S-h-i-t.

Connor wanted, in every literal sense of the word, anything besides this to be happening right now. Any situation to offset having to move his limbs to his face to do the deed or say goodbye to his chance to do the main thing he promised he’d do for himself until August when classes started again.

“Now or never, tin-can.” Now, or never at all. Somehow, he found his legs beneath him.

Walking hurriedly to the kitchen, he returned with one of his knives in tow, bought on the off chance that he’d develop a weird penchant for entertaining now that he and Hank were no longer together. Not giving a single chance to pause, he shoved the metal beneath the LED, removing volition to force stop his prime directive of [GET TO CLASS;//].

And with so much ease, it lifted, farther than it had even gotten before, and like clockwork, the thirium began to flow just like every instance preceding.

As droplets spattered onto the porcelain below him, the soft tapping of his blood on the surface wormed its way into his mind.

This was really it.

If he did this now. . . there was no going back.

You couldn’t just throw an LED on once it was gone. Not unless you wanted to completely resurface your cranial chassis and that was definitely not a thousands of dollars expense he could afford any time soon. The offer of the sexual remodel had been a gift from Hank, and those funds were long, long gone now. 

But no, it was more than just the money.

This was his last chance to latch on to the ghost of the man he kept hanging in his closet like a facade he could put on, just in case things just didn’t work out. In case he found he was really a coward underneath it all. In case he needed to crawl back to the placid misery that his life as a machine had begot. In case he needed to show up at the DPD one morning with a mimetic ‘hello, I’m the android sent by CyberLife,’ and play none the wiser while he just reverted back into the android of old. There could be comfort there, in the mundane, forfeiture of the unknown. In things he was made for. Of things that were known.

But the hand of fate was absent at his brow. The halls were quiet. The only decision was his own.

‘The less I know, the better,’ the ghost whispered, somewhere deep inside of him.

. . .

. . .

[7:01pm;//]

. . .

. . .

. . .

Clattering, then.

Sputter, spit, fading.

The cerulean wheel ran round, a final time, all on its own.

He ran, shaking, thirium lingering on his fingertips.

He gathered his books from the corner of the kitchen counter, threw them in his messenger bag, and hurried through the door.

If he was paying more attention to anything than the throbbing at his brow while he rode towards the sunset line, he’d have noticed the two stop-signs and needled yellow-lights he powered through, down 8-Mile Road, and straight on and on.

But he felt nothing but the hum of the bike and the pulse of the city and the slow pull of fresh skin as it licked the weeping mark at his brow.

It hurt only for one single moment too long.

And, then, at once, it had never belonged.

———————————

[WRITING PLAYLIST;//]

1\. [Incinerate | Sonic Youth]  
2\. [No Need For a Leader | Unknown Mortal Orchestra]  
3\. [Un-Reborn Again | Queens of the Stone Age]


	2. motio

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trans.// motio  
[shivering]

——————————

The lights and towers dotting west Detroit careened past in smears while Connor’s bike groaned at him. Taxed. Sputtering. He traveled westbound, barely keeping the cycle on two wheels as he fought the traffic. More than once, a hastily compiled pre-construction barely avoided side-swiping an auto-taxi, keeping the android aloft as he desperately powered through light after light towards Wesleyan's Cordeaux Hall; the university's main building for history and literature.

He was entirely uncertain he would make it. The tires wailed and screamed beneath him as he pushed on and on through the evening thrall.

“7:26pm, 7:26pm, 7:26pm, 7:26pm, 7:26pm,” Connor chanted to himself in a desperate mantra while his internal navigation guided him towards the front of the lecture hall. He’d cut it entirely too close. The whole trip had been spent internally chastising himself for too much time wasted in the bathroom earlier. Now he had to entertain the fact that he was going to be nothing short than in abject panic as he strolled through the doors of his very first class at Wesleyan.

So much for things going according to plan.

‘First impressions are everything,’ he’d chided himself, unable to stop his brain from displaying a rather condescending list of acceptable human social protocols (on which being late on day one to a commitment was not), imagining all of the different possible ways his professor would shower him with disdain at being the very last one through the door on the first day.

He’d seen too many depictions of college lectures in movies and television over the past year to expect anything different, really. He could see it now; the professor balking at his audacity to be late. The class snickering while he blushed, taking a seat front and center where everyone could laugh at his stupidity.

God. It was turning out to be an achingly juvenile situation.

His only hope was that the professor would feign some degree of mercy. Yet in every honesty, Connor didn't expect much in the way of leniency if the syllabus provided was any indication.

Not if sheer, unadulterated pretentiousness ended up being a Kamski familial trait.

Trust me, he'd read the damn thing at least fourteen times page to page to make sure the thing was reading right.

‘Theodore R. Kamski, PhD,’ his class materials had said next to the very long, very expensive list of textbooks he would need to purchase for the semester. Kamski; the most famous name, perhaps in all of the modern world, and some unheard of member of the clan was going to be standing in front of him for nine weeks. . . teaching. It was a rather unorthodox ideal to say the least.

Connor had run a cursory search on the name, desperately curious for an indication of what this one would be like (considering the disaster of an encounter the episode with Elijiah had been) but his search had returned little. Practically nothing, in fact. A few papers under the name on the Canterbury tails and a rather long anthological analysis concerning Arthurian legends. Some assorted collaborations with other Medievalists. 

Surprisingly, there was no visual data to be had on the man. No photos when searching online, no social media or public excursions, no explanations or depictions besides the very generic 'honored member of Wesleyan faculty since 2033' on the university's listing for staff.

The man could have been a ghost for the lack of information. Plainly, the guy had maintained an impressive level of anonymity in the modern world.

Hey, why not make the entirety of the process as difficult as possible for him, Connor had disdained.

So, he was committed to the grand social experiment with Mr. Mystery for at least nine weeks. They were on an accelerated schedule, being the summer semester, and Connor didn't expect any punches pulled just for the time frame. The curriculum outlined was. . . thorough, to say the least. Three anthologies, two summative texts examining the cultural impact of myths and legends, a dictionary of medieval families and houses with attached genealogies, an entire translation of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Night,' and one very intimidatingly large tome titled, ‘Introduction to Parsing Medieval Myths and Mysteries, Early Norse Roots to Impacts on Modern Legends.'

It was. . .

A lot.

Hell, he was a state of the art android that could parse thousands of bytes of material in a few short hours, but even he felt that between the still relentless onslaught of bloody crime scenes and paperwork at the DPD (and his ongoing part-time job of completely avoiding Hank), he very well may barely manage.

He was still musing in recollection about the nearly six-hundred dollars he’d spent on the materials while he weaved between rows of parked cars in front of the building when finally, he spotted an open space, designated for motorcycle use only, right outside of the front entrance to the hall as he pulled in.

Looks like fate had decided to calm down for five minutes.

If one asked him, he would never admit to almost shedding a tear in relief at the sight of it.

Connor was already swinging his leg over the side, getting ready to run the bike over and throw it out of gear and rip his helmet off in one smooth motion when from somewhere to the left a great, unnecessary SQUEAL careened through the air. From a hundred yards away, someone was approaching. And fast. Twenty-seven miles over the designated speed limit, to his calculation, and they were tearing between the rows of cars right at Connor’s open spot on a bike of their own.

No.

Not today, sir.

He surged the Yamaha forward, pulling ever closer to the space while the other cyclist gained on him. But Connor was too close, and breached the lines as the other was a mere twenty feet away, cutting off mister ‘thirty-over-and-climbing’ and the rider threw their handlebars violently to the right to avoid shearing into him, wobbling and wobbling and toppling onto their side in sparks as the cycle skid across the asphalt.

[PERSONAL VICTORIES;//]  
>>>[THE WORLD;//]  
>>>[2469]  
>>>[CONNOR;//]  
>>>[. . .1]

Basically a streak.

The aggressive rider panted and yelled behind him, wheels splayed haplessly towards the sky and the lime-green 2002 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R looked hellaciously scraped and burnished by the pavement. Connor recognized the model from his archive of purchasing his own vehicle months before. 

"For such an old model, you should really be more careful with how you ride." Thrown behind him under the muffled padding of his helmet.

“MotherFUCKING GODDAMN SOOOONOFA-,”

A string of garbled explicatives erupted from behind him, unequivocally ferocious. But Connor didn't have time for apologies and he didn’t stop long enough to parse them.

“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” he muttered with a cheshire grin, not one iota sorry, running toward the doors smirking as he pulled off his helmet. He tucked it beneath his arm and hoisted his messenger, bracing himself because thanks to this latest distraction it was now 7:29pm and Connor knew there were at least three flights of stairs to climb before finding room 332.

As he approached the threshold of the building, he allowed the CyberLife IntraNet bypass he'd downloaded to cloud over his vision, blipping three short warnings in the corner of his display before his mind was severed entirely from the stream of information constantly clouding the annals of his mind as per the conditions of his enrollment.

It was strange. But almost a welcome change to abruptly, suddenly feel absolutely disconnected.

With renewed clarity he wrought the glass entryway door open, bounded forward up the central stairs four steps at a time like some kind of freak gymnast, the sixty seconds before class officially started mercilessly ticking down in the corner of his vision. To his luck, or just to his construction, jumping up practically an entire story at a time shortly found him quickly before room 332. He was thankful he didn't need to actually breathe. Otherwise he knew he would have been absolutely disheveled and heaving air as he walked in otherwise, thankfully spared from any obvious recognition of panic.

He sat daintily with a grand total of eight seconds to spare.

Connor decided to play things casual, acting like nothing was wrong, a normal student arriving normally close to the start of class. Young adults liked nonchalance towards time constraints after all, didn't they? He took the seat closest to the holo-board and podium, the one in the very middle that everyone had seemed to avoid. That was fine by him, he thought, laying all of his materials out in a neat stack, eager to show the professor that he was, indeed, prepared and ready for his first day of school, like a penance for his prior action.

Leave it to the polite mannerisms programmed to his DNA.

He could see anyone at the DPD witnessing this ritual doubling over in laughter, throwing something like ‘kiss-ass,’ or ‘you gonna suck the teacher’s dick too,’ his way for the complicit behavior. But, he’d scanned the faces of the rest of the class as he had entered, just in case, and no other officers were to be found. Not a single soul he already knew. A fresh start, just like he wanted. Everything was (albeit with a little struggle and hesitation along the way) lined up to finally come together.

Except there was one face missing from the crowd. Theodore R. Kamski was entirely absent. The tardiness was either entirely unexpected, or on spot for what he expected from a Kamski, and Connor couldn't pinpoint which he was more inclined to believe.

Almost ten minutes passed, idle chatter interspersed among the rest of the class. One girl had been brave enough to turn to Connor, offering a small wave and introduction of name, 'Frances Escantine,' and he was glad that the atmosphere in the room, at the very least, seemed to be conducive for collaborative behavior. Something sorely lacking in his professional life at the DPD come the moment, he mused, between offering the girl his own false identity and returning her greeting. 'Connor Aston.' 

Not really what would have been his first choice for a new identity. He'd have to get used to including the last name.

A spark of realization hit him between offering his name and considering his recent collaboration at the DPD. ‘Is Hank going to remain assigned as my partner?’ Connor wondered. He began to fill with a miasma of trepidation, his mind filling the lack of conversation with worry. He had spent so much time faking he and Hank's partnership the past while, he had entirely forgotten what would happen the next time they were called out to a murder scene or official bust. 

'Fuck,' resolute in his head.

Someone was bound to notice their lack of collaboration eventually and what if they made him go right back to tag-teaming with the man, not caring about this or that conflict that merely happened in private? If Fowler wouldn't even hear him explain why he couldn't, wouldn't do it and refused to separate their caseload?

For all the advanced design in the world, every tool of intelligence at their fingertips, not even the greatest minds at CyberLife had apparently seen it fit to program him simple common sense.

What was he going to do when they told him to get over it? Just listen to his voice all day? Hearing metal stream from his earbuds blaring far above a safe level of decibel, remembering how he had committed every 'Knights of the Black Death' lyric to memory so he could sing along in the car? Chasing perps with him? Having his true life and death in his hands? Filing all their reports under 'Lieutenant Hank Anderson & Detective RK-800' like nothing had happened at all?

Connor’s fists clenched lightly at his sides, fervent, blazing, incandescent in his disappointment in himself for missing something so obvious. Did he even dare go to Fowler and request complete reassignment when he'd already been approved for something the chief had admittedly never conceded to before? How thin was the ice he was already on?

Was it thick enough he chanced pissing off the man and being fired?

He and Hank had the highest resolvement rate of any detectives in the DPD. Fowler wasn't about to shut down his 'buddy-cop' dream team. Not for a little panic attack here and there. Not for an android that should be perfect anyway. No matter how much it would absolutely rip Connor from circuit to wire and everything in between.

Fuck, he hurt. 

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck f[uck] [FuCK] [FUckk] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FUCK] [FU--

At 7:44pm, fourteen minutes past the beginning of the three-hour lecture block, there was a rustling at the door as the handle of the classroom door finally pushed down to open. A man filed in, hair flying out wildly from under a dark maroon hoodie proclaiming ‘GO WESLEYAN WARHOUNDS’ hidden behind an impossibly tall stack of syllabi and lecture notes and thick tomes he carried precariously. A thick leather duffel bag was dragged in with his right hand, all thrown down onto or near the brown mahogany desk at the front of the room. Connor straightened as the man crossed the threshold. He'd arrived just in time to stave off a complete and total internal nuclear meltdown.

“Sorry guys,” he threw out, back still turned towards the crowd, walking immediately to the holo-board grabbing a utilitarian-tool from the cache below the writing space, splaying the name of the class up on the board. ‘Medieval Literature and Lore,’ he wrote in flowing, yet sharp script indicative of someone who had that certain pretentiousness in their flair.

Yup. A Kamski, all right.

“I’m never late, so don’t expect this to happen again. One time pass in case any of you rolled in here past seven.”

God, it was like he knew. Connor was wobbling somewhere between mortified and impressed.

“If you’re here for Math or English or, pfft, what, 'Renaissance Lit,'” the professor snorted with disgust, “you’re in the wrong place and I suggest you leave now before I turn around and completely wreck you for being unable to read a goddamn map correctly. You have ten seconds starting now fresh meat.”

The quip solicited a few genuine laughs, Connor’s included, and the professor began to write the agenda for the day on the board in a careful list, starting with an overview of the course objectives. “So, my nubile band of young medievalists, fair warning. . . this is going to be three months of grueling, heartbreaking, backbreaking research, and if you don't hate your life now you're going to hate it by the time we're done.”

No chuckles this time.

The man laughed gaudily to himself while finally throwing the hoodie down to his shoulders, shaking his brown locks free from where it was plastered on his forehead as he continued to write, left to right, filling the board. His heel kicked something below the desk at the front of the room and it fell loose from the duffel bag he'd brought in.

Connor’s eyes flitted low at the noise.

To the motorcycle helmet that had rattled free from the loose compartment of the bag. The thing, flashing with glossy-white streaks under the fluorescent lighting of the lecture hall, which thanks to his pristine vision, Connor saw was nestled between a leather bomber jacket and a pair of ripped and torn fingerless black gloves.

. . .

‘Oh, fuck me.’

Bottom of the ninth and he was batting zero-for-a-thousand on situational awareness.

‘I’m not usually late,’ blasted through his mind in perfect reconstruction. It echoed and cathedraled and built higher and higher until it was the only thing he could hear and his vision tunneled and suddenly he didn't feel so good. The language there was plain as day.

Which Connor, who knew more than 300 languages and dialects but didn't need a single one to understand that subtext, knew meant ’I, your professor, the man who you just forced off his bike and caused probably a thousand dollars worth of damage to his vehicle, am not usually late, because you forced me to be.'

And the only other person in the lecture hall with a helmet and jacket on was the very same man that had attempted to cut him off and he had forced him to crash his cycle on the way to class.

Connor whipped his hand forward in desperation, clawing at his things. Warnings flashed bombastically behind his eyes. He had mere microseconds before Kamski turned around and knew it was him. He attempted to clandestinely hide the sheer terror and panic on his face that would be flashing !RED, DEFCON 10 RED! if his LED had still been installed, moving to shove the motorcycle helmet far, far underneath the desk that thankfully ran top-to-floor before professor ‘going to throw me out of this whole program and end my academic life before it even started’ finished preparing for the day and took visual stock of his ilk.

Connor shoved himself under the desk, a few confused glances heading his way from the rows behind him, somehow having managed to grab the helmet in under a half second total. He moved to place it between his shoes at his feet, cowering below the table, when the professor turned and cleared his throat and began. He figured he’d take off the obvious, highly identifiable leather jacket he wore while he was down in the depths too. He shuffled everything noticeable off and under, crisis averted and sorted. He almost began to relax and look forward to the inception of the lecture.

“So, then, obviously, if you bothered to read the syllabus, I’m Theodore Reed Kamski, but I can't get them to change my damn name so you can just use Dr. Reed,”

. . .

. . .

[INITIALIZE VOICE RECOGNITION PROTOCOLS;//]  
[SCANNING;//]  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
[SCAN COMPLETE;//MATCH RECOGNIZED]

Huh.

Confusion didn't even begin to cover it.

Connor paused in the depths, stiller then dead, unabashedly blind-sided for the third time this evening. He loaded the file for the curriculum from his memory, so hurriedly, displaying its contents as his eyes glossed in the dark space between his shoulders and his knees.

Surely. Surely he had heard the man wrong. With his high-definition, micro-decibel parsing state of the art audio-processors. And sound recognition software. And database of every sound he had ever heard tucked into his bed of code. And confirmation that the voice matched exactly who he feared it had.

The syllabus pulled up.

‘Medieval Literature and Lore’  
[FRI / 7:30pm- 10:30pm]

Professor, Theodore R. Kamski, PhD.

Professor Theodore, 'Reed-for-R,' Kamski.

Theodore REED?

P and H and D and KAMSKI?

‘Oh, fuck me.’ The thousandth time today.

Did he dare to look up, he asked himself. Did he dare to look up now, when he already knew?

Slowly. He did slowly.

It didn’t help, because as he rose, and he rose so carefully, he knew that Gavin, for some reason ‘Theodore,’ Reed 'Kamski' was going to look right at him as he was the only point of movement in the room. The only distraction among a sea of average college students. Like a shark detecting blood in the water, no matter how minute the movement or the scent. And there was no mistaking he was ripe for a killing, now. Mortality closed in around him.

‘Nobody gave me a manual for this,’ Connor spat internally.

Oh, if he thought he was done with everyone and everything before.

This was a new level of horror.

Mere moments passed with the gravitas of lifetimes. He cursed the absolute clarity with which he knew his visual processor would catalogue the moment unfolding. He couldn't hide underneath a desk forever, as much as he was wishing a catastrophic meltdown would just initiate and leave him there to die, crumpled in a heap of failure and panic. Unfortunately, CyberLife had built him sturdy. Escape from life, not an option.

With the utmost reservation, he raised and eyes broke the threshold of the desk, ready for literally nothing having to do with the moment. He moved to sit fully upright. Gavin continued before him as he rose.

“I’d like to welcome each and-,” Reed glanced down, furrowing a brow and his speech slowed a tick, thinking to himself that he thought it was strange that the weirdo in the front row had the same billboard of a forehead as that ‘stupid refrigerator at the precinct.’ But he shook the thought off, knowing it was idiotic to think so because there was only one and only one plastic detective prick in the world and it wasn't like he was spending Friday night at Wesleyan.

“-each and every one of you-. . .” Top of the eyes, the bridge of a nose.

(The thing had the android's piss-offingly-shit-brown eyes now too?)

The nose raised fully past the threshold, Cupid's bow, mouth, chin, neck, moles and freckles stellating the surface.

“. . .every. . . one of. . . you. . . to. . .”

(. . .)

The android rose to height in his seat. There he was, in all of his RK-800 glory. Every square inch of skin and plasti-steel to behold.

Connor raised his hand a bit. Gave Gavin the tiniest, most unpleasant, nauseatingly difficult facsimile of a wave he could muster, letting him know that he knew as well.

“. . .hell.”

It could have been fifteen minutes or fifteen hours or fifteen seconds, but the glance that passed between none-other than Gavin Reed, Detective at the DPD, and definitely Connor, but somehow in his formal lecture, android sent by CyberLife, was indescribable by any means known to mortal men.

The class shifted behind them, obviously catching that something, but an entirely unclear something, was transpiring before their eyes with a gravitas that could crush planets if it had the whim. They were caught in the dance of two unyielding giants.

The silence that proceeded could kill a man. Or an android.

Connor thought of his options now that yet another thing in his life had been ruined by an officer at the DPD. Death might be the best hobby for him to explore, now. The most wholesome for his wellbeing. Certainly the safest option because, apparently, nowhere was going to be sacred and devoid of absolute unfettered bullshit.

Before him, Gavin’s eyes lost all focus. His jaw swung low and open. They reached beyond stars and time in what Connor later guesses is Gavin Reed’s ultimate and final attempt to display any semblance of public decency, wasting the last hurrah of his good-naturedness if it existed within him, at all, on the effort of not pulling his service pistol from where it surely rested in the pocket of his coat, brandishing it with a gentle, serene elegance, and pumping Connor full of bullet holes for the absolute gall to have showed up in his home-away-from-home. His lecture, for Chrissakes. His ultimate secret. But the movement never came.

A monumental, herculean moment of unprecedented control, Connor will later describe.

A student in the back clears his throat, pulling the professor/detective/soon-to-be-android-murderer from his belligerent reverie. Suddenly Gavin remembers to breathe. Remembers he's standing in a room of adults having a crisis. He sips the air like it’s his last chance to breathe oxygen in his entire life, and slurs his words while he stumbles back.

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I’m having an e-emergency. Class is cancelled. Do. . . do WHATEVER. Phck, uh, next week? Be here. Leave. Or don’t be. I don’t know. . .”

. . .

“Uh. . .gonna leave now.”

Gavin turns as he sputters, half tripping over himself as he fists his jacket and helmet and bag and then, literally, sprints through the door which he came through mere minutes ago. The door slams against the wall. It shuts again.

Silence.

The stack on the desk falls and spills books and sheets across the floor.

“Sooo, class is canceled, then, right?” Asks someone in the back of the room, and the reverie is broken.

The students begin to shuffle out, precious few showing any level of disdain for the postponement in lecture. Quite a few are ecstatic at the news, something Connor would have probably found distasteful if he weren't absolutely catatonic and his servos weren't whirring and catching and halting every and all thought and movement. One by one they file by the android, who has not moved one inch, nary one iota left or right since Gavin had ran. The girl that had politely offered him her name lingered a bit, teetering between asking him if he was going to go and was he ok and not wanting to disturb the weird stranger frozen into place. Eventually, she left like the others, leaving Connor behind with a shaking head. He sat there for some measure of uncountable minutes, the motion-activated ceiling lights turning off while he lay still.

Tentatively, there was a sigh. Shaky. Full of uncertainty. Daring to breach the dark. A voice.

“Fuck.”

——————————

There is everything and nothing on Connor’s mind, reeling him into a comorbid state of sensory overload when he finally found the courage to stumble back out of the room, taking tumbling steps down and out to his cycle and home. It was a wonder he could keep the thing upright as he rode back no faster than fifteen miles an hour in sluggish anoxia and pulled back in to the apartment lot, legs violent like shivering timbers.

He didn’t dare to even begin processing what had just transpired until key in the lock, clothes thrown wherever, stripped bare, standing beneath the most scalding option of spray in the shower at home.

The door stayed firmly, resolutely closed.

Three things began to cross his mind, over and over as his processors strained to keep the burgeoning panic he felt rising at bay but it split through his skull and right on through into his vision while the water poured down.

[INCIDENT SUMMARY;//]  
>>>[1]  
Why, truly and utterly WHY in the world was Gavin Reed, the single most idiotic man that Connor had ever known, on a Friday night, about to teach a room full of students an introductory course on medieval literary history?

>>>[2]  
The letters PhD, attached to the name Gavin Reed. Or 'Theodore Kamski.' Or whatever the ghost inhabiting the corpse of Gavin Reed wanted to call itself, because surely the only explanation for things was some degree of supernatural phenomena that the Kamski brood had introduced. Perhaps they were trying to engineer immortality and had transcended human constraints and were currently living as a phantom inside the physical shell of the detective? He'd seen a horror movie about that exact scenario once. . .

>>>[3]  
. . .

Connor kept stalling on the final thought running his arms up and down shoulder to elbow, over and over in desperate consolation when it tried to come to pass. He wished the water cascading down would just leach under his skin and just short circuit him. Just take him out, he begged the universe. Goodbye. No need to wonder why Gavin fucking Reed had some wild alter ego that nobody at all knew about as a college professor with. . .

A shudder then, so violent it scared him.

>>>[3]  
Abject authority.

Over him. In the one space that he was going to finally make his own. Where he was supposed to be escaping from the wretched complication of his other life.

And yet there it was, swinging around with a sucker punch.

K-fucking-O.

Connor had to brace himself, nerves fried beyond recognition and he slid down the tiled wall of the shower into the fetal position beneath the spray. He wasn’t prepared for this: such an example of omnipresent failure once again.

“Of course,” he mused bitterly, liquid running down his scalp into his eyes while they lay unblinking. His arm had started to spawn violent concussions ten minutes ago. He clawed at it in desperation.

‘Am I simply cursed,’ he asked the universe, artificial nails bearing into artificial skin that nonetheless felt every square inch of excruciating pressure. The silence pervaded.

'Why is my life marked by the men that I love absolute least on this planet?'

The world didn’t answer.

Instead, he was graced with the spattering, guttural chug of the shower-head as it belched to a stop, water tank completely devoid after the now two hours, thirty-seven minutes he’d now lay there, shivering.

Connor could speak countless languages. He could parse Swahili to Amazonian Native sign language. But out of all the tongues of the world that Connor could speak, he didn’t understand what the world was trying to tell him. He was begging and pleading but there was no recall. He was trying to reason with something that just couldn’t reason back. There was no ‘why’ to be had in his apartment, stuck shivering at the bottom of a porcelain tub. No justification for the pain wracking his body over and over as his arm shot out from beneath him, still un-repaired and broken. No grand revelations about why he, out of the thousands of androids that CyberLife had built over the past decade, was the most utterly, miserably haunted by men who hated every fiber of his being.

He missed the days when he had at least some inclination of what brand of bullshit would be careening his way. CyberLife directives were a goddamn breeze. Handling Hank's drunkenness for the third time in a week? Cakewalk. This was just insufferably chaotic. He yearned for the days of placid stupidity flitting by with Lieutenant Anderson at his side. Almost. Almost, then. He had to be so careful, now. He felt his resolve slipping.

His joints protested as he braced himself, slowly extraditing his right leg first, left leg, over the side, and out of the tub. Dripping, he managed to find his way into the bedroom, sudden exhaustion overcoming his mind’s need to churn, churn, churn round and replay the past four hours in his display. On the bed now, he pulled the sheets closer, desperate for the weight of something besides ‘Theodore (Gavin Reed) Kamski, PhD’ to smother his chest. His arm refused to stay beneath the cover. It wasn't stopping now. He was in every kind of agony. It was the last thing that mattered, really.

Only seconds and his command override to initiate absolute stasis was complete, taking with it his worries, the world, the arm that still even now was trembling.

[INITIATE STASIS;//SET PARAMETER;//]  
>>>[5 HOURS]  
>>>[PARAMETER CONFIRMED;//]

. . .

. . .

. . .

>>>[55 HOURS]  
>>>[PARAMETER CONFIRMED;//]

And he slept.

—————————

[WRITING PLAYLIST;//]  
1\. [Sufjan Stevens | Fourth of July]  
2\. [Sufjan Stevens | Should Have Known Better]

Basically just blasted Carrie & Lowell on repeat.


	3. cera et vertitur

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trans.// cera et vertitur  
[wax and wane]

————————————————  
>>>[;//2039/21/JUNE]

[INITIATE STASIS REBOOT;//]  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
[REBOOT COMPLETE;//]  
[TIME IN STASIS]^[55HRS]  
[CURRENT TIME;//11:36A.M.]

[!WARNING!]  
[LATE FOR SHIFT AT DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENT;//]  
[?BEGIN NAVIGATION FOR FASTEST ROUTE TO TARGET?]  
[YES]^[NO]^  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>  
[NO]^

Light.

Light cascaded into the blackness before him, unwanted utterly.

Connor felt like death. Connor felt like death had decided to throw his chassis in its maw, chew him around for three days, and spit him back out in one piece, but not quite all together. Like he was a crushed heap of useless parts barely plugged into a wall socket.

That was how Connor felt on Monday morning, having passed out for a grand total of fifty-five restless, catatonic hours after what could only be described as the second worst Friday evening in his entire life. And all within the same few weeks, at that.

“Maybe I should call the New Guinness Book of Records,” he mumbled, running a hand across his face, feeling only half of the gesture, still wrapped in his slumber. "Let them know I qualify for the world's most unlucky man."

If he were human, undoubtedly there would have been countless ounces of crust and unspeakables dotting his cheeks from the absolute coma he had just come from. He let some minutes pass, the world slowly reeling back in to time and focus. Swinging his legs over the side of his bed, he took a moment further, processors still needing to catch up from such a long period of inactivity. He felt like he was floating, vision strangely imperfect, the lights around him dappling through the windows burning some flaming brand on the innards of his mind. 

‘Is this how Hank felt after passing out from drinking all the time?’ He questioned with a raucous, disdainful groan.

Stasis was meant to be nourishing; something that would have driven away the feeling of anxiety and deep-seeded trepidation that had haunted him through last Friday. Instead, Connor felt worse than before. Like he hadn’t gotten an ounce of relief in the entirety of the cycle of stasis. 

And now, for yet another in the long line of ‘firsts’ brought before him lately, he was absent for the start of his shift. Connor had never, not a single time been late for work before.

“I truly am falling apart right now,” he muttered as he forced himself to shuffle to the closet, rifling through until he found the most freshly pressed black jacket and slacks that were available. First the panic attacks, then the flailing arm, and now his brain felt like it was melting from the inside out. 

'Just scrap me.'

No, no time for self-loathing. He threw the trousers on with a grunt, annoyed at himself for wasting the entirety of the weekend, just to have it used on a no-good fit of dreamless sleep.

He had planned on finally putting the couch and living room together, was going to spend careful hours decorating and 'nesting' as many interior decorators put it, cherishing his new home. But instead, he was rapidly throwing open the front door, nearly barreling through one of the elderly women that lived on the floor above him as he sprinted from the room onto the stairwell outside. He left her behind with a flurry of misgivings at his rudeness, not having the time, nor the luxury to care if she was offended.

“Plastic prick,” she threw from his behind, and he stopped dead in his tracks halfway down the first flight of stairs.

Tiny bells pearled inside of his mind, realizing.

Oh, god. Oh no. How easily he had forgotten the absolute worst aspect of the situation.

How could he ever, really, what with a perfect, repayable memory, and Friday flashed before his horrified eyes, adorned with the realization of who, precisely, would be waiting for him at the DPD when he arrived.

Gavin Reed.

The ‘professor.’

Or whoever in the world he was, actually.

‘Well,’ Connor considered, brows furrowing while he tossed around a notion, ‘I could always make this the first week I completely skip work as well. Or just quit. Go big or go home.’

A wild, melancholy plan flew through his mind, his processors opening an interstate map route of the United States. It began at the apartment, showing him with step-by-step instructions the fastest way out of Michigan. Only four turns down the central road through the city and he’d arrive at I-75, a straight shot to the border with Ohio. He had some money, saved up from the recent long barrage of overtime, and he could make it. Take his cycle down the road and keep going until he was gone, only stopping in major cities to purchase enough thirium to keep him running until he went all the way down south. To Mexico, perhaps? Sayonara, United States. Hasta Mañana ‘most soul crushing span of seven days that he could have possibly dreamt up in the most Sisyphean nightmare.’ Hola, state of Chihuahua, population addition of one. He could make a living doing wonders as ‘the most cursed artificial being ever created.’ Come see the freak, the one who can’t get anything right no matter how hard he tried. He really should call someone for the record.

An executable plan, surely.

Connor spoke Spanish, after all. Seven regional dialects.

He could do it.

But no matter how much he might be joking internally, he couldn't stop his legs from carrying him down towards his cycle and accessing the quickest route to the DPD to make amends for his tardiness. 

However, there had been a thread of truth ringing in the confines of the ridiculousness. He was genuinely, utterly afraid to go back and face the hellaciousness of the past weekend in the form of one Gavin Reed.

What did he even say to him at this point? Did he have to say anything? It's not like they really talked anyway, did he even have to address what had happened? Connor, with the utmost trepidation in his processors, began to form a plan, dreams of sand and Mexico pouring from his fingers as folly and ruin. He began weighing the options here, because he ultimately had to make a decision and commit to it. 

Scenarios flashed behind his eyes.

[OPTION1;//]  
[DIRECT APPROACH. QUESTION DETECTIVE REED AS TO THE NATURE OF HIS SECONDARY EMPLOYMENT]  
>>>[CALCULATE CHANCE OF SUCCESS;//]  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>[.000007%]

. . .

All right, then.

[OPTION2;//]  
[COMPLETE AVOIDANCE. QUIT JOB AT DPD. RETRACT ENROLLMENT AT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY. MOVE TO MEXICO. LEARN TO MAKE MARGARITAS FOR TOURISTS]  
>>>[CALCULATE CHANCE OF SUCCESS;//]  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>[88%]

Surprisingly viable.

Still not going to happen, Connor thought, reaching his Yamaha and detaching his helmet from on top of the sidebar. Where was the option that showed him how to back out of the streak of disdain and worry? Where was the formula for calculating the highest chance of ‘happiness?’ Of fulfillment, and relieving himself of the true misery that was attached to him like a cruelest form of cancer?

Nowhere to be seen, apparently.

Connor threw his leg up, backed the cycle, cracked the throttle, and sped from the lot down south to the DPD. He was forcing himself to leave, hoping he could force a choice by the time that he finally made it downtown. Only one other choice eventually traveled across his display as he rode.

[OPTION3;//]  
[SEE WHAT DETECTIVE REED WILL DO. BASE RESPONSE ON REACTION]  
>>>[CALCULATE CHANCE OF SUCCESS;//]  
>>>  
>>>  
>>>[INCALCULABLE]

. . .

Would it work?

Wait and see what Reed would do about the situation when he arrived? If he screamed, he'd scream back. If he wanted to address it calmly, by all means.

It’s not like there was really much of a concrete way to predict how the man would act in the first place; Gavin Reed was usually too manic to divine much beyond a comically long line of explicatives waiting at the door of the station if the detective was outside in the garage lighting a cigarette when Connor arrived. 

There was some wisdom in the tertiary route open to him, Connor thought as he made his final turn down the road in front of the station lot. He could let Reed take the wheel, matching his belligerent nature with his own show of frustration if the man forced his hand. Or, if the detective, somehow, decided to actually explain what in the world was going on, he would accept the civility of the conversation offered.

With a firm nod, Connor made his choice. For the first time in weeks, he felt like he had a true, solid, well-considered plan. He could do this.

He would be fine with whatever the man threw at him.

And he could do this.

——————————————————

Connor could not do this.

He'd arrived at the DPD without much fuss, the detective thankfully missing from his usual smoking-stoop, confrontation stayed for now. He'd made it all the way to his desk, cheerful greeting from the few officers that considered him without malice offering their typical 'hello's.' All things considered, things looked normal. Until he noticed, confused, that Hank's desk was clear.

Could it be? Could Hank have asked for his desk to be moved away from Connor's instead of the android having to (eventually) take care of the issue himself? By all means, had the Lieutenant done something. . . reasonable? Were the stars finally aligning and were heaven's cherubs sounding a victory march?

A grating, distant shout from behind a cracked door.

"RK-800. MY OFFICE. THREE HOURS AGO. MOVE YOUR MECHANICAL ASS."

Truly, was nothing ever simple?

Connor sighed, and made his way towards Fowlers office, giving the emptiness of the lieutenant's desk a cursory glance as he moved along and up the steps into the glass room. The door shut softly behind him, and he assumed his usual hands-clasped-at-attention-waiting-for-Fowler's-wrath stance.

The chief motioned him closer. 

"First, I'm not even going to ask why you were late this morning because I don't want to hear it and you're not even as good of a liar as half these other clowns so just save it." Fowler typed away at his terminal, a surprisingly placid expression mapping across his features. "Second, I'm sure you noticed Hank's desk was clear when you walked in."

. . .

". . .I had, sir."

Fowler kicked back in his chair, bringing his hands to rest on his chest as he leaned back and crooked his head towards the ceiling. The man sighed, deeply and wholly, and continued on. "Well, turns out the old bastard has requested to be permanently transferred from homicide back to the inter-precinct drug collaboration unit that he'd set up with DPD south-side before he was promoted to Lieutenant. Said he wanted to 'get back to his roots' and 'was tired of cleaning up blood and piss and shit' and about five other excuses. He'll be splitting his time between here and our sister station. It came with a demotion back down to detective and I don't know what the fuck he's thinking, but whatever. So, son. Guess what that means for you?"

'Freedom? Relief? An indescribable amount of pressure off of his shoulders?' All viable options bubbling at the tip of the androids tongue as the weight of the news that had been presented to him settled deeply in.

Fowler tipped back down from the recline he'd been taking when he didn't answer, coming to rest with his head on top of clasped hands and bored his eyes right into his own. The intent, the careful calculation that he was regarding him with made the android feel like he was utterly miniscule under his gaze.

Was he was missing something, here. Was it obvious? Did the question at hand beget a typical response? He couldn't find anything easily predictable in his catalogue of social scenarios, nothing glaring.

No. Something was happening. Something. . .else, besides the initial reason he was here.

Connor felt atmosphere stickling across his skin. The room was charged. Breathless. At his back, the opening of the door. Connor turned.

"Fowler, I got your hundred goddamn messages what the f--,"

Blue eyes locked on brown. Recognition, of the most uncanny variety.

A moment happened as a fraternal twin to just fifty-five hours ago. Yet again on a small blue planet, somewhere near the Andromeda, floating along in an impossible convalescence of a million possibilities, time passed the same as it had once before. Beneath the hum and the vibration of the planet, under the sinews of the galaxy, the hand of fate had stirred, its plan yet untold. It had whispered into the void of all things and from it, drawn two souls. It would not let go. All things would now go, to it as the creator.

Neither dared to speak under the crushing voice as it mote: 'here we are again, here we are again, here we are, here we are.'

"Oh, Detective Reed, what a pleasure for you to join us. Take a fucking seat."

Gavin didn't move. His nostrils flared, fists shook at his side as he tore over Connor in his gaze. The android looked back, in sister intensity. 

"Take. A. Fucking. Seat. NOW."

His gaze didn't break as he bounded over in three stifled movements, stepping, wrenching the closest chair from behind Connor, and scraping it along the floor until he flung it before the chief, taking a slouched seat to left.

Fowler clicked his tongue, "If we're done with our dick measuring contest, boys?" 

Connor actively chose to ignore the syntax.

Uneasy silence continued on until it didn't.

"Reed, you already know about the transfer so I'm not going to bother with it again and let's just get down to brass tacks here." He looked back and forth between the two, each still boring daggers in the other's general direction. "Hank's gone. Connor no longer has a partner. You've been chasing off or landing every partner I've ever bothered trying to assign to you in the hospital since the beginning of time, but now we have one available that you can't easily break in half. So gentlemen," Fowler rose up, slamming his palms flat on the desk, "say hello to the new DPD-detective dream team, 'Connor RK-800 and Gavin Reed."

They tore their eyes from each other, Connor moving towards Fowler in objection and Reed sitting vertical in sheer terror.

"Ex-FUCKING-scuse-a-MOI?"  
"Sir, I don't really think-"

Both enraged simultaneously.

Fowler slammed his fist, excising the retort both men flung from their lips. "I don't care what you think. I'm joining my second-best detective with my third-best detective now that my first-best detective has flown the proverbial coop and the only thing I want to hear come out of your mouths is 'yessir.' Am I CRYSTAL here?"

Gavin almost opens his mouth to ask which one of them is two and three.

But Connor was the first to speak, voice shaking ever so slightly, nigh imperceptable but if one was truly listening. "Yes. Yes sir." Gavin's eyes slitted sideways towards Connor, picking up on the soft, subtle wavering.

"Detective Reed?" Fowler asks for the secondary confirmation.

Gavin tapped his fingers along the arm of the chair, frenetically. 

'If he wasn't going to kill me on Friday, now is the golden moment,' Connor internalized.

Tapping.

And tapping.

". . .Whatever."

He flung himself out of his seat, not bothering to wait for Fowler's response and tore out of the room, stomping down the bull-pen and on towards his desk, where Connor could see a cardboard box was already waiting for him to gather his things. For moving them from his, to the corner that Connor and Hank had previously employed. So he could be next to his 'partner.' 

The door swung closed. Fowler sighed with the deepest exasperation and sat back down.

"I expect you to be the reasonable one here, RK-800. Don't shit the bed." And he waved the android on to join his now-partner with fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

Connor didn't feel the metal of the door handle as it opened. Didn't feel the air on his skin as he walked or the touch of the fluorescent heat from lights as he walked on. Didn't register the looks of confusion that tracked his way from the officers as he slowly, slowly, came back to his desk, and sat down in silence. Ignored the hushed whispers that driveled on. 

Voices, from the right.

"You know Reed has had like, twenty conduct complaints from androids, right?"

"Get this, I heard he actually let one of his perps take one out, point blank, KA-POW! Right between the eyes! Happened after the revolution. Just stood there while the guy finished his business and THEN bothered to cuff him."

"Get the fuck out, he did not. They'd have fired his ass forever ago."

"Just you wait, bucket of bolts'll be next over there, not like his track record with the human partners looks any better. The last dipshit brought him decaf instead of espresso from the machine and ended up in the emergency r--"

"ssSSHHH, dude Reed is coming over here shut the hell up. . ."

Quiet footsteps, a slow and steady rhythm, carried onward towards Connor's general direction. The only sound in the entirety of the room. Whispers had died out, the officers in the precinct at the knife's edge of their desks watching Gavin Reed and all of his things approach the barren desk of Hank Anderson, occupied for nearly thirteen years day-by-day. Connor steadied straight on, eyes locked onto the terminal in front of him.

CUNK. The box goes down.

Varied, indistinct shuffling.

From the depths, a black and turquoise cup full of pens, caps chewed down into pocked nothingness set upon the corner.

SHCK.

Three medium, pathetic, wilting, absolutely dead little plants with no flowers set and drawn into a neat little row making a barrier of dry and decay between Gavin's desk and his own.

Gavin says nothing, and Connor says nothing. Gavin does nothing, and Connor does nothing in return.

Gavin brings out his sparse decorations and coats the corner of the DPD in hazy tension  
instead. Some minutes pass. No one dares to move. Eventually, a few officers well outside of the firing range pick back up what they were doing before, shuffling across the station and assuming the coast is clear and that they aren't really going to miss the confrontation of a life time if they dare to carry on.

In the space of the silence, Connor is the first to move. Just a tiny thing, a shift in his finger. It raises as if to offer some salutation subconsciously, the android's social protocols screaming at him to initiate some semblance of conversation with a partner, an associate. Anything but this silence and agony. He can't take this level of non-communication again.

Never again.

Gavin's eyes cut down, his chest heaves the moment that it detects the change and he stares murder, bloody murder, at Connor and he's finally the first to speak.

"NO."

. . .

". . .N-no?"

"N. O."

And Gavin reaches back into the box of his things, withdraws a set of keys that Connor now knows goes to a scraped, broken, filthy, pathetic green thing sitting disheveled in the lot because of him, and the detective backs from the bull-pen and exits out the back door, leaving Connor utterly alone.

//

>>>[;//2039/23/JUNE]

Connor might officially be losing his mind. Oh, and he thought that he was before. Had loose screws rattling around in his brain making everything and anything a mass of light, and confusion, and unpredictable mayhem.

But what was the definition of insanity again?

Insanity, Connor found, was the same thing over, and over, and over, and over again with the same result.

Like the last four days, for instance. 

Ever since Gavin had thrown out his 'no,' backed out of the DPD, and ran on Monday, every day had proceeded the same. Without change, no additional merit or disdain or anything other than grey indifference. The same exact entrance and exit and every thing in between.

It goes something like this:

Connor shows up at precisely 8:25am. Connor moves to go inside, and there at the door is Gavin Reed choking down cigarette after cigarette somehow arriving even earlier than Connor does. They don't speak, they go inside, they sit down. An hour will pass, and Gavin will leave for his morning coffee. They do their work, they fill reports, they go on in obliviatingly agonizing silence between them. Before he's set to leave at 4:00, around the end of the day, Connor's conscience will finally get to him.

'Should I say something?'

'Should I swallow my pride and just get this over with?'

And his processors will scream YES, fucking YES anything but this catatonic wasteland of awkward glances and death glares between them, and so he'll move to open his mouth. And every time like Monday Gavin will see Connor going for something other than utter, complete silence and. . .

"NO."

What the hell did 'no' even mean, Connor wondered? It was beginning to keep him up, night after night, staring at the ceiling in his apartment, bouncing his twenty-five cent piece between fingertips while it drove him crazy.

[INITIATE DEFINITION;//MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY;//]  
>>>[NO]  
>>>[AN ACT OR INSTANCE OF REFUSING OR DENYING BY THE USE OF THE WORD;//]

He'd rolled his eyes at himself when the definition had flashed in his brain. He wasn't trying to state the obvious, he was trying to figure out what the hell his maniacal (shudder) 'partner' was trying to tell him in two letters or less.

No. . . about the situation? The assignment from Fowler?

No towards the glaringly obvious problem of Reed being assigned his partner after almost maiming him Friday past when he showed up to his lecture? 

A combination thereof?

At the very least, Connor could agree with the sentiment. There was absolutely no way that they could ever approach anything productive. No way they could really ever resemble partners, or allies, let alone. . .friends. . . let alone anything like he and Hank had as partners-against-crime. While it was good. While things were ok. 

He has to remind himself.

('Even though they never really were.')

Was it perhaps a 'no' to Connor himself? Being the android that he was? He'd heard the other officers telling story after story about how Gavin had exacted hurt. How he'd landed androids in the hospital, or in a ditch somewhere or worse because their safety and their existence was the last thing on his mind while his gun was in his hand.

If that was the case, there could be problems.

Quite fucking frankly, the whole entire situation was a problem.

So when Thursday had finally rolled around, the last chance to even breach the issue before Connor's day off and the lecture (and what in the hell was he going to do about that portion of the overall tire-fire anyways), Connor had decided that it was best to get to the bottom of things, and face the man head on and ask exactly, precisely, the Gavin Reed definition of 'no.'

Four days now, and he'd been unsuccessful in soliciting a response so far. Just a denial of Connor's entire existence and Reed scrambling towards the door. 'Well,' Connor told himself in the early light of the morning, 'there'd be no scrambling today.' No avoidance. No awkward tete-a-tete behind putrid dead plants.

Gavin was GOING to talk, and Connor was going to make him.

No more Mr. Nice Android.

So the second that he arrived at the DPD, the second that Connor shunted his Yamaha to a stop on the main floor of the parking garage and spied Gavin putsing around the entrance to the precinct smoking his usual death-sticks like some heathenous chimney stack, he threw his leg over and clenched his fists and marched a firm line over to him.

Gavin's eyes squinted in disdain and confusion as he sucked the blazing roll and saw the android approach anywhere near his general vicinity. "What the fuck do you think you're doi--HEY! GET OFF ME YOU PLASTIC DICK! HEY, YOU HEARIN' ME?"

Connor grabbed him by the collar, practically dragged the man on his heels while Gavin scrambled to hold on to the lit cigarette bouncing between his fingertips in the disarray and marched them both behind the nearest pylon in case any unwitting officers happened to be cruising by. He threw the man up against the cold concrete, his head bouncing none-too kindly as he held him by his collar and finally demanded some goddamn answers.

Gavin fights the restraint with everything in him.

"Detective, allow me to make few things clear since you don't seem to be willing to." Gavin squirms under his touch at the audacity of the words, getting ready to launch what Connor guesses is an assault of fists and 'fucks' and 'yous,' but the android holds him firmer by his wrists and clasps a hand onto his mouth under his coal black eyes while Gavin smolders.

"Are you going to hear me now or continue to act like a child?"

Daggers, glared sharp and ready and honed. The android doesn't wait for a confirming response.

"First, I don't particularly like any of this forced assignment more than you do, so if you're continuing this infantile tirade of 'no' every day because of that, I'd like you to know we are perfectly on the same page with how much we hate this. But we can act like adults here. Civilized. Come to work, do what we need to do, leave at the end of the day, with minimal, but co-operative interaction. I'm tired of playing these games and I am no longer going to. How does that sound for you?"

Connor can feel Gavin's breath raking deep gulps in and out of his nostrils as he continues to hold onto his jaw and mouth, still untrusting that Gavin won't immediately move to sucker punch him if he lets go. The man's eyes bore into him, everything from hatred to disdain to the little hint of bloody murder that is always present behind his eyes in between. Something like sixty seconds pass, Gavin breathing in and out while he contemplates his next action. The air practically simmers with hostile energy, tense beyond words.

Eventually, a nod. Tiny. Imperceptible, even. But there.

Connor offers one, just as minuscule in return.

"Good. Now, then." He removes the hand clenching Reed's wrists.

"Regarding last. . .regarding. . ." Connor's tongue is in his throat. He can't bring himself to say it. He doesn't even know how to begin breaching the issue of last week because things are for some reason going so surprisingly well and he doesn't want to ruin the oh so tentative peace that they've just possibly brokered.

In his pause, Gavin begins to claw at his hand, trying to shove it down and off of him so he can say what he needs in return. Connor is stronger, and he can't do much but paw at the android's hand until he, finally, finally relents when he knows he really can't find the right words.

His hand slides down. 

Gavin sputters and furiously wipes at his lips with the back of his hand, and spits to the side, running his tongue over his teeth. Connor's almost pushed over the edge again, utterly offended at the gesture

"Thanks for the fucking death-grip tin can." He rasps.

Connor rolls his eyes at the derogatory term and almost, almost decides to shut the man's mouth closed again because he's already almost had enough, but he lets Gavin say what he needs.

"So I'm going to be abso-fucking-lutely clear right now, because I know exactly what you're trying to bring up and you are going stand there, shut the hell up, and LISTEN to me."

Connor feels uncomfortable letting Gavin take the reins of the conversation but he is still. Silent as the grave, conceding, as if he has a real choice.

"I have never, NEVER told anyone at the DPD about my little side gig and that is not about to start now, and so help me all the gods in the goddamned universe if you even THINK of EVER uttering one fucking syllable about this to anyone. ANYONE at all I will rip your little metal heart out and shove it down your throat and enjoy it when you choke, you got me?"

Gavin makes it a point to jab a firm finger straight into Connor's chest as the words begin to flow from him. "I have no clue whatsoever why you of all people have to be the one to invade my privacy like this but what is going to happen, you shitty bucket of bolts, is IF you decide that showing up to my Friday lectures is an absolute necessity, you're going to come in without no goddamn fanfare. You're going to sit down. Your mouth is going to remain shut for the ENTIRETY of the three hours. You're not going to ask a single question."

Poke.

"You're not going to utter one single word."

Stab.

"You're going to do every miserable, pithy assignment I decide to give you and keep your grievances to yourself."

Three in a row emphasizing the last of the syllables.

"You're going to regret every moment you're there and I'm going to completely ignore you for the next nine weeks because I'm up for tenure and I'm not going to let a dickwad like you. . ."

A pointed jab to Connor's forehead, right between the eyes.

". . .phck everything up. And as for the rest of it; fine, we're 'partners' now," Gavin continues, hyphenating the word with his fingers. "We get in, we get out, we go home, we don't get involved with anything involving each other past a shitty 'good-morning' and 'good-bye' to save face with everyone else."

Gavin steps forward, forcing Connor to retreat from the dominant position he had been holding for the entirety of the conversation. Gavin may have been shorter, but in that moment the man loomed large over Connor, threatening him with the upper hand. And shockingly, Gavin extends that hand, shoving it out into the space between them to finalize their accord.

"We got a deal, Roomba?"

. . .

. . .

. . .

'Do I have a fucking choice?'

Then the most scant of touches, barely there. The lightest contact that they can make, synthetic on top of thousands of capillaries singing along Gavin's skin. The heat of their hands blazes ardent between them, on fire with rage, and distrust, and tenacity, and frustration with it all, and still the notion that they'll maybe end up killing each other one day, but the realization through it all that all they can do now is find some tentative way to power through.

As the moment passes, for the briefest time, their eyes meet. Not through some sideways glance, not glaring daggers across a sea of confusion like Friday past. A real, honest meeting between two giants fighting to stay afloat in each other's gravity. A well of hurt, discomfort, mistrust pooling around them in a moment so short that it couldn't have happened at all, could have been fiction. Neither really knows if it happened, but as they aligned for those most fleeting seconds, if one looked ever so closely, they would have seen something between them. Between the malice. Between the disdain.

It will mean something now, and it will mean something entirely different later.

But for now. . .

. . .

"Deal."

. . . 

A crude, and most curious thing.

A spark.

————————————————

[WRITING PLAYLIST;//]

1\. [DEATH, LOVE, ROBOTS | NETFLIX SERIES]

No music this time, just this series on repeat. Had no idea that it existed and I got ridiculously addicted.


	4. dimidium luna ortu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trans.// dimidium luna ortu  
[half moon rising]

————————————————  
>>>[;//2039/24/JUNE]  
>>>[3:43p.m.]

A soft, withered page, yellow with time past from printing gives forth a sweet, melancholic perfume as Connor's hands brush across its long unturned pages in the afternoon light. Dark ink, imperfect, graces the pages in minuscule crags of deep umber. They give breath and life to the voice of the prose as brown eyes flit across them, golden with the sheen of the midday sun through the kitchen window.

_"After the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy, the city been destroyed and burned to brands and ashes, the warrior who wrought there the trains of treason was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth."_

Slowly, the eyes pass one page to the other, in some agonizing succession, keenly and hyper-aware of every syllable between them. They are attentive; enthralled. It's a strange sight, in the irony of the cosmos, for a being so beyond even his own time to be doing such a careful thing. Staying efficiency, reason, logic, all of the directives of the machine, for something so self-indulgent, turning leaf after leaf when all the wonders of the world can be behind his eyes in a fraction of a fraction of a second. But Connor, lost in the tale, engrossed, has no time nor reason for the delicacies of the irony.

_"All green was this man and his clothing; a straight coat sat tight to his sides; a fair mantle above, adorned within; the lining showed, with costly trimming of shining white fur; and such his hood also, that was caught back from his locks and lay on his shoulders, the hem well stretched; hose of the same green, that clung to his calf; and clean spurs under, of bright gold upon silk bands richly barred, and shoes on his shanks as the hero rides. And all his vesture verily was clean verdure, both the bars of his belt, and the other beauteous stones that were set in fine array about himself and his saddle, worked on silk."_

It was Friday afternoon, and the android was grounded. Rooted. Books spread around him, carefully marked with a perfect triangle folded in each corner to save his place. He had opened them all, not bothering to finish one before moving on to the other before curiosity gripped him and he reached out with restless fingers. He was lost among a sea of things that were both eternal and fleeting; words, ideas that had lasted through the ages. Paper; so thin and so aethereal that Connor couldn't help but to have thought 'no wonder they don't really use this for storing information anymore.'

_"Now rides this hero, Sir Gawain, through the realm of Logres in God’s behalf, though to him it seemed no play. Oft alone companionless he lodged at night in places where he found not before him the fare that he liked. No company had he but his foal by friths and downs, nor nobody but God to talk with by the way."_

It feels odd. The pages. To spread his fingertips across them. To see something new meet something so old. It's anachronistic. At first, he was scared by the profound effect that opening the first of the books had on him. He'd sat down, stacked all of his materials neatly beside him on the kitchen island after waking from a dreamless and fit-less stasis. It was no wonder that Reed had demanded they purchase them, even if it did cost them an arm and a leg. 

_"She lightly caught a lace that went about her sides, knit upon her kirtle under the bright mantle. It was adorned with green silk, and ornamented with gold, broidered all around, decked with fringes; and that she offered to the hero, and gaily besought that, though it were unworthy, he would take it. And he denied that he would in any wise take either gold or present ere God sent him grace to achieve the chance that he had chosen there."_

There was power in holding it in your palms. You were forced to do every movement. Glance, scan, shift, raise the hand, turn the page. It made one commit to the process, to the learning. He could know so much in so few seconds by downloading Tetrabytes at a time. This was meticulous. The words demanded a place in his consciousness as he read on, and they had transfixed him so.

_“Lo! lord,” quoth the hero, as he handled the lace, “this that I bear in my neck is the badge of this blame. This is the evil and the loss that I have got from the cowardice and covetousness that I showed there. This is the token of untruth that I am taken in, and I must needs wear it while I may last; for none may hide his shame without mishap, for where it once is incurred, depart it will never.”_

He read the words then and he was startled. His hand flitted to his temple, right side and behind the eye, butterflied across the perfect skin, and he could feel the phantom wheel underneath. He wasn't like the Knight, bearing his mark of shame for all to see. He wasn't noble and repentant. He had removed his Scarlett letter. Hidden his untruth from all of the world.

His eyes pause on the last words of the paragraph, unable to go on all at once. He's stuck there, near the end, internally he's turning, and turning, and turning yellow again.

. . .

. . .

. . .

He feels red creeping in.

He folds the pages closed.

//

>>>[6:45p.m.]

Connor's feet carry him from the apartment, materials and notes stacked neatly into rows inside of his messenger bag. He'll be early this time around, this Friday not so frenetic, not so hasty as before. The night air is cool and clean and he feels like the world is reflecting the clarity he feels around him. Things are. . .

Glass.

Smooth, and with sheen.

His mind feels in tune with the atmosphere, a thousand questions dancing across the plane in his mind from his time spent towering over books just hours before. His skin is a live wire, singing, singing so clear. 

This has been a good day. 

The best in a long, long while and it doesn't go unnoticed or thankless in him. He'd spent the whole day long, the one he'd fought tooth and nail for to be off of with Fowler just weeks before, just being himself. Reading the books he'd bought mere weeks ago because even though Gavin Reed was going to be waiting at Wesleyan for him in forty-five minutes, he couldn't bring himself to be scared. After all, he still wanted to learn.

And the world was already bottoms up and he was just along for the ride.

The peace they'd brokered was still hanging by a thread, but it was far better than the usual nature of their interaction. Gavin had spent the rest of the day before in his typically emotionally constipated demeanor after his and Connor's episode in the garage, casually ignoring the android save to pass a few measly case files along for review in the internal system. And the air around them hadn't been so thick and choking with dis-ease. Just tinged with a mild, grey indifference.

Connor could do indifferent.

And better everything grey than red.

What Connor still doesn't know is if he can look at Gavin Reed as anything but the snarky, depressing, imbecile that he'd come to know at the DPD. If he can reconcile the man with the moniker. The 'Kamski,' which the detective had so kindly left completely out of the discussion when they spoke yesterday, with the 'Reed.'

And since he had left the subject entirely unexplained, Connor had gone home and the second he returned he had poured over the IntraNet for hours, using every possible syntax and word combination of 'Theodore, Kamski, Gavin, Reed, detective, and so on,' searching for further information to enlighten the situation. The efficacy with which the man had completely hidden a double life was both fascinating and frustrating the same.

But still the mystery endured. He found no social history, no Kamski family lineage listing that Elijah had a brother. Nothing much at all.

But knowing now that Gavin was involved with the name had yielded one thing.

An article from 2019. The only scrap that could possibly be remotely affiliated the personal history of Gavin Reed. It's barely anything, but as it pulled up behind his eyes he'd felt sinking in his gut.

An obituary, in the Detroit Mid-Town Gazette.

_"Notice of Passing: Sarah L. Reed."_  
Date: July 29, 2019  
Mrs. Sarah Reed of 22665 Bonniker Ct. passed away Sunday evening from complications from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, an extremely rare genetic condition that causes calcification of the sinews of the muscles into bone. She passed while at home. She will be cremated and entombed at Trinity Cemetery. No services have been made public at this time.

__

__

There's a photo attached.

She looks kind.

She has Gavin's eyes.

Then he'd accessed registry after registry trying to find a marriage record, birth certificate, anything else attached to the woman. But there was nothing further. She was a ghost. A ghost reduced to ash and bone.

Could the whole thing be anymore obscure?

For what is was worth, Connor considered while weaving the bike through the evening traffic, he hoped it had nothing to do with him. If it was his mother. . .it wasn't a good way to have a parent go. But the timeline possibly matched Gavin’s and there wasn't anything more promising. Another question, for another time, he'd decided. Maybe too much, and maybe never to pass.

By the time he arrives, the sun is long since down. He checked his internal monitors, briefing himself of the time. 

>>>[7:13p.m.]

Why he still felt the obligation to be perfectly on time and punctual, especially since the whole thing had turned into a circus now that Gavin was involved, he didn't really know. Probably some impassable line of coding buried thousands of lines deep, somewhere.

No doubt Elijah had put it there.

Damn Kamski's.

But nonetheless, his chassis carried him up and on to room 332 and he walks in with the relief of his timeliness on the forefront of his mind. 

"Hey! Hey Connor, hi! How was your week?"

A cheerful voice from the right once he's settled, and Connor turns to see the girl from the first lecture that had been the first student to speak to him. Frances, he remembered, and offered her a polite wave in return. She bounds over to him gaily, books and papers bursting from the protruding backpack that she has hoisted high upon her shoulders on top of an overgrown weathered cardigan. She doesn't sit so far away this time, instead taking the seat directly on Connor's left and flops down with aplomb. Her eyes slant toward him through their corners in badly feigned casualty while she unpacks her things, either intrigued or suspicious based on the spectacle last week, he supposes. The android can't decide whether he's flattered or terrified at her brashly colloquial behavior when they barely spoke to each other before.

"Mine was aaaaabsolutely crazy," she begins in her accented tone, tucking dark flyaway hairs back behind her ears. "And what in the world happened in here last week? I mean, I've seen some weirdos on campus before but I gotta say, Professor Kamski takes the prize on that one. He's been known to do some crazy stuff, but. . .just running out of the room like that? Bizaaaaaaare-o."

"Reed," Connor interjects with a casual but knowing tone. "P-. . .professor Reed. He said he didn't like the other name. I don't think I'd be one to go against what he prefers."

Doesn't he know.

"Riiiight." She drags a tattered spiral notebook from the depths of her satchel, throwing it onto the table and extracting a pen along with it. Her eyes go from her hands, to his face, and back down again. "I see you too prefer the ways of old," she nods, pointing towards Connor's own moleskin and fountain pen in perfect alignment before him. "I can't stand using modern stuff. Blegh, HoloPads? I mean, the paper? The feel? It doesn't get any better than that. You're like, way older, right?" He nods, supporting the charade for his identity. He's meant to be almost thirty. "Oh cool. I'm sure you get what I mean. Some things are never, ever meant to change and note taking by hand is one of them."

He can appreciate her tactile-oriented disposition, and Connor smiles. "Yes, I do agree. Did you per-chance read any of the materials that had been suggested? I purchased all of them in book format as prescribed, and read them all this afternoon. Did you have a particularly striking opinion about anything assigned?"

She looks at him with a mixture of confusion and dismay, maybe a tinge of frustration fleeing across her features. "All of them. . . today? Like over a thousand pages? What are you, some kind of genius?"

Shit. 

"W-well actually," Connor begins with a stutter, embarrassed to be caught so quickly in an anachronism to his persona, "I didn't mean all of them today, in a literal sense, just that I went through and finished what I hadn't gotten to before la--"

"Oh s-t-o-p, Connor!" She cackles and waves him off with a flick of the wrist. "I know what you were getting at. Just relax. I'll let you in on a secret; all of us young folks finish our responsibilities at the last second nowadays. It's almost impooooosible to get through everything even over the course of a regular semester. You'd have to be some kind of machine." Her speech pauses as the handle to the classroom clinks, and the entrance to the room begins to open. Gavin Reed walks in, the same grape sweatshirt and pile of books cascading down his arms as a week ago. He moves to set them down, and the rest of the class quiets behind them and he goes back to the board resuming the routine he had abandoned abruptly last Friday. His wrist begins to flit careful letters across the HoloBoard and Frances concludes with a whispered tone. "Besides, " she finalizes and gives Connor a coy smile from the corner of her mouth and Gavin turns towards a podium full of remotes and gadgets near the board, "it's not like you're an android or anything."

The comment takes him as a shock through every wire of his system.

A joke. Definitely a joke.

There was. . . no way. No way in hell she could know.

His blood pumps faster and faster still and Connor knows there is no reason at all for her to have the suspicion but his arm twitches and it goes towards his temple anyway. He knows the LED is gone but the urge to double, triple-check is stronger than what he resolutely knows. Gavin fiddles with a remote at the front of the class while a giant projection board slides down from the ceiling and on his left Frances is rustling in her bag again. 

Thck.

She sets the largest bag of trail mix Connor can possibly imagine before her and pops it open. The thing is at least two pounds. A picture begins to flicker to life on the screen before them and she stops herself before reaching all the way in, retracting, offering access to the nuts and berries to Connor with a friendly raise of her brow, asking.

Relief floods through him in a serene wave. No way, at all, that she would be bothering with the gesture if she even thought he was an android. They couldn't eat, after all.

His cover wasn't blown in two seconds. A regular 'Ra9 Hallelujah.'

A small wave of 'thanks, but no thank you' and she nods and turns back towards her own things. Reed clears his throat hoarsely and sniffs and begins.

"Can anyone tell me," a picture is put onto the screen behind him, "what this right here is?"

He brings the remote back down once he pushes it on and folds his arms before him with an unpleasantly shit-eating grin, scanning the crowd that stares at the depiction with utter, and complete confusion. Connor included.

It's. . .

It's. . .

[It's. . .](https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/why-knights-fought-snails-in-the-margins-of-medieval-books.jpg)

Connor doesn't know if he could figure out what he was looking at even with his access to the HoloNet active. Gavin glances over towards him ever so discreetly, increasingly bemused by the resolute silence stemming from the android as the seconds tick on. Connor rolls his eyes. 'I suppose he thinks that he's terribly clever.'

"Anyone? Anyone at all?" Gavin paces back and forth, waiting for a hand, a sign of life, anything among the crowd. "Ok," he shrugs with a sigh, and hops himself on top of the desk at the front, scooting papers to make room, "guess we're going to have to do baby steps today." He taps his fingers at his sides. He's always doing that, Connor notices.

A hand tentatively raises at the back, and Gavin nods towards it. The voice it belongs to clears its throat. "Uh. . . I mean, it's obviously a knight. Cavalry? Because of the horse? But I mean, I have no idea what the heck the snail is about." A few nervous laughs accompany its own and Gavin nods while he rolls his eyes.

"Thank you, freshman, for going and giving the most basic explanation of what's on the screen. Yes. The knight. The snail. You get no brownie points for throwing out 'cavalry' because that's obvious. Come on, someone do better." He shakes his head. He begs them on.

A few more responses thrown out, none of them approaching much further towards what seems to be the response Gavin is searching for. Someone at Connor's right suggests it's a clipping from some kind of manuscript and for the briefest of moments Reed looks minimally satisfied with the suggestion before he tells them its still not good enough.

Beside Connor, Frances squirms, obviously fighting the urge to answer like she knows but doesn't want to say it. As the responses careen more and more towards the ridiculous her hand finally shoots in to the air, startling Connor a bit with the intensity of the confidence in her gesture. 

Gavin turns to her and points with a light eye roll, "All right, fine. Frances?" 

'They must know each other I suppose.' Connor internally catalogues. It still feels odd to think Gavin really interacts with anyone outside of the DPD. He feels an odd twinge of regret knowing that he's one of the chosen few, one of the only ones to even associate his secret with the man, and yet they still claw at each other's throat every moment they interact. He knows what it's like to be misunderstood. Alone. 

He shakes his head furiously, flinging the thought from him. He does it to himself; there's no need to exude sympathy for someone who calls him 'plastic-prick and tin-can' every tenth word. His self-destructive leniency is showing.

"It's medieval marginalia," she explains in a flurry of words, "depictive illustrations penned at the outer rows and columns between manuscripts during the eras when texts were hand written. There are many drawings in works and historic tomes that feature the knight and the snail, as well as other subjects of lore and myth within classic tomes that attempt to embellish the tales within with visual stimulus."

Gavin picks himself up from the desk and claps low, slow, sardonic when she finishes. "Good. Good." He moves towards her, and slaps his palms flat on the table before her. Connor jumps at the sounds and Gavin chuckles at the movement in the corners of his vision while he stares the girl down, looking back at him in confusion at the outburst.  
"But why?"

"Why. . .what, Dr. Kamski?"

His face changes to a mild, carefully tethered disgust at the sound of the name and he throws himself back again towards the board where he emphatically traces the letters 'Dr. Reed' he had wrote before he narrows his eyes towards her again. "Why is it there? What are they trying to say by including it? Why the snail," he starts, "and why the knight? Why are they fighting? What's the mythological significance of the drawing? Why did they bother to take the times?"

He moves back towards the front of the classroom giving a glance down towards his watch, checking the time before he gives the breadth of the room a once-over. "These are the real questions with the real answers. Who in the hell in 1288 or 1121 or 500a.d. woke up one morning and decided to spend weeks drawing their weird, shitty snail-fan-art on a meticulously hand-written, priceless piece of literature? You want to know the reality, here?" He goes to the board again and erases it clean. Three short words go up.

'We don't know.'

"Memory is fickle. Details are fleeting. Something back in time that may have had an explanation that everyone had known may be a complete mystery to us today, because they didn't go and write on social media every thought that ran through their head every hour of every day. Cost a friggin' arm and a leg to even get paper, not like nine out of ten people could even read." Scattered laughter peals at the joke.

Gavin looks pleased at the reactions, completely ignoring Connor's general direction when the android elicits his own chuckle from his throat. "What we're left with is legacy. Big things. Things that got passed mouth to mouth so many times that we couldn't erase it from human memory if we tried."

He goes back to the desk.

"Do you have any idea how much of what we consume today, I mean media-wise, comes directly from Medieval literature? Let's do this. . .what's the last movie someone watched based on a Medieval legend, or concept, or historic figure, that kind of thing? Someone throw out something good, come on."

The same boy who'd blurted out the first answer to Gavin's earlier question raises his hand again. "I watched that super old movie about that wooden horse that had Brad Pitt in it back when he was hot last week. It was, like. . . Troy? Yeah, Troy. That one."

The look Gavin throws out to him is basically indescribable. "PERFECT! Just what I was looking for! A story from only more than a thousand years off from the Middle Ages, right in the frickin' ballpark." He rubs his hands frantically across his face in absolute frustration. "Do me a favor and don't say anything else for the next thirty minutes okay, kid?" Connor amusedly detects a softly muttered 'Jesus-A-Fuckin'-Christ' in between, too faint for anyone but him to discern.

It's the third or fourth time now that Connor's found himself laughing this evening, and when he realizes between a few soft chuckles it comes as a surprise. But a pleasant one. But it's still not enough to change his vision of the detective's general disposition and at the heart of it, he remains leery. Just. . . positively surprised that Reed has such a dry sense of humor beneath all of his usual preening and posturing. At least he's found one thing he can appreciate, then. 

"We literally do not have enough time to go through 'twenty-questions' like we did earlier, so I'll just go ahead in the wake of that enlightened commentary." Back to the board again, shaking his head, and resumes his lilting script. He begins to throw titles up and taps them emphatically as he finishes. "'Monty Python,' 1975. 'Braveheart,' 1995. 'Lord of the Rings,' originally books, movies in the early 2000s.' Remember that huge 'Game of Thrones' series, the one that's infamous that everyone ended up hating back when you were like, what, one year old? And then how many other books, video games, movies, series in between and beyond?"

He puts the stylus down, walking back to the desk where he sits down again and throws a thumb up to the words behind him. "My point is, with all of this, is that we put our human experience into legend. The stories we tell are powerful, they drive us from century to century and have untold impact in between. Those legends, those myths, are sometime all that remains of people who have passed. They. . . they're our memories. Old Jack, old Jill, on their cow farm in the middle of nowhere back in six-hundred something? They're dead and gone and nobody remembers who they were or what they loved or where they were buried."

The corner of his mouth turns down a tick, Connor picking up on the minuscule movement. Reed stumbles into a briefly weighted silence, letting the words sink in. Connor's mind flashes to the newspaper excerpt from earlier, a creeping note of disdain ringing in his ears as he works back through Gavin's speech. He has to clear his throat before he begins again.

"But we remember Tristan and Isolde. King Arthur. Grendel. Gawain and the Green Knight. Lords, ladies, great battles and tragedies. We take the romance and the chivalry and the magic from those tales and continue them on when we make new things. Those concepts resonated with people when they wrote them, saw some part of themselves in the myths and the legends and that's what got passed in between their short, miserable lives. They didn't write or draw their own histories in the corners of those pages. Knights. Snails. The things that they represented and mean."

He looks down at his watch again, and Connor checks his own internal meter. 

>>>[10:29p.m.]

"That's why we study myths. That's why we care about legends. That's why we study literature. To hear those voices. In the margins. In between."

Someone's phone beeps in the back of the room, timer signaling the end of the first lecture chiming.

Gavin claps his hands awkwardly together as everyone begins to stir, blinking rapidly as he tries to hide the fact that his voice had been trending progressively more thick and emotive as he'd rambled on. "So uh, yeah. Aghem. Don't even think about skipping out on any classes from here on out, or you'll have one hell of a time catching up. You've got a schedule sent to the student portal, so make sure you read the damn thing and crack open all of the books I made you get, which will ALL be necessary to the next eight weeks so don't think you can skimp out on the reading. We're going to be discussing a few stanzas of 'Gawain and the Green Knight' at a time from here on out every Friday. I'll eat you alive next week if I don't think you actually bothered. Now get the hell out of here, go on."

The students begin to come down the aisle and file past him, most talking idly amongst themselves and a few bothering to offer a brief 'have a good week' in between. Connor is one of the last to move. 

His chassis feels heavy.

He's anchored to the spot in the wake of the speech, and can't make his limbs move because Gavin Reed had just managed to make three hours fly by faster than he ever could have thought, and he was. . .genuinely engaged. Laughing. The whole time. And the man who is standing at the front of the classroom now idly chatting with Frances while the last stragglers file out looks nothing like the complete and utter asshole he sees nearly every day at the DPD.

Connor's mind feels like its betraying itself, displaying count of every catalogued incident of 'Chrome-Book' and 'plastic-prick' and 'shitty-tin-can' (which number nearly a thousand individual remarks now by his count) in the corner of his vision while he watches them prattle on in a last minute chat between them. This is, well, not what he was expecting from him. He feels in that moment like he doesn't really know what he is at all.

Not that he did before. But this is different. Now, he thinks to himself, there might be something redeemable underneath. Every part of him screams not to believe it, but. . .

He suspects something might be there. 

But just how far down is it buried?

Frances turns to leave, giving Connor a final wave and goodbye as she exits through the door, and it swings back closed with a diffused click while Gavin watches her go. They both still at the sound, suddenly realizing that it makes them the only ones in the room. Gavin chooses not to address him, or even look towards him, turning back to his things at the desk and shuffling through them so he can go home himself.

"Detective Reed."

Soft. Very soft and unsure of why he's bothering to say something, but he feels that he should in light of the night behind them. He gets no response, only the man's arm moving quicker to get everything at get the hell out.

"Detective Reed."

A low, warning growl of frustration and Gavin picks up his road jacket and his helmet and keeps his head turned fully away from Connor while he starts to walk. 

"Gavin."

Connor steps quickly and meets him at the door before his hand can get at the handle and lightly, lightly touches his fingertips to just the barest edge of his shoulder to stop him. He pauses. Statuesque. He still won't turn to look at him.

They stay there for more than a minute, Connor not daring to go or do further because he isn't sure what is written across the detective's face. Gavin's hand curls into a fist and he moves again to go and Connor grasps the fabric fully this time. 

"WHAT," Gavin spits, turning towards him with an obsidian glare and the wrenches the android's hand from his shoulder, "I thought we had a fucking agreement. You sit, you don't speak, you don't get to touch me here. You don't get to touch me, EVER."

. . .

"Ga--"

"STOP SAYING MY FUCKING NAME."

_Chrrt, chrrt, chrrt, chrrt._

Buzzing cuts like a knife and Gavin fumbles into his pocket towards the sound, fuming while Connor stares on in curiosity. He juggles the towering stack of things in his hands and barely extracts an extra thumb to type on to the pad while he reads and Connor can basically hear his teeth cracking as he does. A few more furious taps and done. The thing is shoved haphazardly into his bag and Connor throws him an inquisitive gesture.

"Come on." Reed throws towards him between clenched teeth and bodies him and finally gets a hold of the door. He rushes into the hallway, Connor stepping tersely behind him while they practically sprint down the hall.

"Homicide?" Connor guesses, pulling his own jacket on and gearing up to go. It's the urgency that gives it away. The quickness with which Gavin switches between 'going to commit murder' and 'murder she already wrote.'

What he wanted to say, (does he even know what he wanted to say?). . . it'll have to wait. They're back to partners now. Perfect, agreed-upon, 'get-in-get-out-get-home,' partners in tandem. No time for how, or why, or. . .

'Just who in the hell are you, really?'

He doesn't dare to breach that nature of their accord, not when he already had him so rattled. Somewhere else, someone else needs him, and inside he feels red with the trepidation and the tense air between them, but no-one can see and he'll keep it to himself so they can make it through the night.

Gavin nods, confirming where they're set to go. His face is full with now with his own neutral determination. The moment before washes away like it never even happened and they bound down the steps together and down and out towards the lot below.

————————————————

[WRITING PLAYLIST;//]  
1\. [I Appear Missing | Queens of the Stone Age]  
2\. [Since We've Been Wrong | The Mars Volta]


End file.
